Deliverability

The email that doesn’t make it to the inbox is like the proverbial tree that falls in the forest with nobody around to hear it – what’s the point?

One of the eternal quests of email marketers is to stay out of the spam folder. Still, deliverability, while at the heart of all email communication, is often one of those priorities that gets buried by our focus on measurements like list growth and open rates.

Times have also changed for how email clients and internet service providers decide what does and doesn’t get into the inbox. You may remember the First Age of Deliverability, the Wild West, no-rules era of email — or the Second Age, which centered around the “report as spam” button.

As email marketing expert Chad White describes, we are currently in the more nuanced, complex “Third Age of Email Deliverability,” where filtering decisions take into account both individual and collective engagement. That means the same message from a company following all the deliverability best practices can get stuck in the spam folder in one person’s email and waltz into the main inbox for another.

So how do you optimize deliverability and what do you do when you find your labored-over emails plunge into spam purgatory? I chatted with our email and support expert Diana Potter to find out.